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Living in London I find myself caught up in the constant rush of the city.

Sprinting through tube stations, barging the elderly out of my way - only to be devastated when I realise I’ve missed my train, and will have to wait all of threeminutes to catch the next one.

Because of this, my New Year’s Resolution this year was simply not to be in a rush, to take my time.

Needless to say, it’s not going well.

As human beings were exceptionally good at making commitments and resolutions, but notoriously bad at holding to them.

Is this because we’re all lazy, bad people?

Or could it be that we just don’t fully understand how our minds really work?

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In the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt takes the best ancient wisdom from all the major religions and philosophies, and puts it to the test of modern science and psychological research.

There are ten major ideas in the book, and each one, if applied, has the potential to dramatically improve your life.

However, like all great books, there is one core underlying idea that must be understood to get anything from his work.

In the happiness hypothesis, the idea is:

The human mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.

Or in Haidt's words:

'To understand the most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.'

Metaphors for the Mind

Often the surroundings of our culture help inform the metaphors we use to think about the world.

Plato, Freud and the Buddha, lived in worlds fill with domesticated animals, so they used metaphors like charioteers, wild horses and elephants to describe the human mind.

Nowadays, we live in a world of computers, data and information processing, so we think of our minds like computers that act rationally and make decisions based on logic.

Haidt argues that this is faulty, and that, the older ‘domesticated animal’ metaphors for the mind were actually a more accurate way to think about our brains.

In particular, Haidt likes to describe the human mind like a ‘rider on an elephant.’​

The rider is the conscious, planning, rational part of the brain. It sets goals, makes new year's resolutions and decides to improve as a person. The elephant is the automatic, and emotional side.

Imagine you are sitting on top of a large elephant.

What can you do?

Well you can read maps, talk to other riders and guide the elephant in the right direction.

But ultimately, if the elephant wants (or doesn't want) to go somewhere, there is very little you’re going to be able to do about it.

Why is the elephant so powerful?

The brain you're using to read this has been evolving for the past 600 million years.

For the vast majority of that time, the brain’s main purpose was simply to keep us alive, and respond automatically to threats and opportunities in the environment.

About three million years ago, automatic systems in brains had gotten so sophisticated that they allowed birds to navigate using star positions, ants to cooperate to fight wars, and early humans to begin developing tools.

Many of these creatures had systems of communication, but none had developed language.

It is unclear exactly when it happened, but scientists estimate the new manual part of your brain responsible for language and rational thought (the neocortex), only began developing between 2 million and 40,000 years ago.

Whenever it happened, the key thing to realise is that this new part of our brain (the rider), has only been around for a very short period of time.

Therefore, it is a lot less evolved (and much less powerful), than the older limbic system, or automatic ‘elephant’ part of the brain.

Further, we now know that the neocortex, although good at long term planning and making new associations, has very little power to cause behaviour.

The limbic system, however, includes all the parts of the brain that do cause behaviour. It’s also responsible for making us feel pain and pleasure, triggering survival behaviours and causes the release of feel good hormones like dopamine.

Getting the Elephant and Rider Working Together

To summarise:

Each human brain is divided between an older automatic system (the elephant) known as the limbic system, and a newer rational system called the neocortex (the rider).

The older, automatic system is hundreds of millions of years older, a lot more evolved and powerful, and is the part of our brain responsible for causing behaviour.

In the Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt's key argument is that in order to have a happy, fulfilled life, it’s critical to get these two parts of our brain working together.

Otherwise, you’re like a rider who wants to go one way, sitting on top of an elephant determined to go the other.